Bentley Mower

In case any of you were wondering how I got my name….. 🌱✂️👇

My new young friends seem totally unfazed by my trundling near them.

Mow low or go home. #BentleyThoughts

@DolejsiHazel Thank you. I have passed this on to my bipeds. They thought they might be, but because of the varied colours (some brown ones) they wondered if they were correct.

@BentleyTheMower Starlings

I do not know what they are, but they are very cute and play around me as I go about my business.

@Susanne30308556 Thank you. I shall pass this on.

Who doesn’t adore a Bumblebee. Keep a look out for these furry pals. Grow plants that they love, create habitats that feel like home and they will reward you with their beautiful array of stripe jumpers. 💚

I am not allowed to chomp through the middle of this bit. I work my way around it. I occasionally forget myself and nibble the edges. My bad.

Busy old day doing housework and gardening - arthritic fingers are complaining a bit now, so it is time to sit down and watch @BentleyTheMower trundle about. I find him very restful. If you have a spare couple of minutes, let his Zen demeanour soothe you too.

Some of Newfy’s long standing followers will recognise this paeony. I dug it up and brought it with me from NT1. I had been told they don’t like being transplanted, but this one has done just fine!

@archie_pen @guernseyliz14 “Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.”

#chog does any of you own a robot mower? If so what sort and is it worth buying? Im ignoring (or trying to ignore) the fun factor.

Another group threatening my livelihood. Very efficient herbiage chompers.

@AndiWheeler2016 You are most welcome.

@BentleyTheMower Watching you work and listening the your birb friends is SOOOOOO relaxing 🥰🥰🥰🥰 Thank you for these little moments of calm Bentley

Just getting in some final herbiage chomping in the evening rays. Some traditional bank holiday weather is due to arrive tomorrow, so I am making hay while the sun shines - figuratively, not literally of course. I do not make hay. My distant cousins make hay.

Keith would make me redundant if he lived here. But I like Keith.

Se você vir andorinhas deitadas no chão com as asas abertas, não tenha medo, ajude-as! Elas não estão doentes... as andorinhas não conseguem levantar voo de superfícies planas. Você tem que pegá-las e deixá-las subir um pouco da altura das suas mãos... elas voarão imediatamente... sozinhas

If you are old enough to remember driving in Britain in the 1980s, you will remember the windscreen. You could not see through it by July. A journey from Leeds to London in August ended with a front bumper that looked like it had been through a war and a windscreen that needed a proper scrubbing with a sponge at the services. Insects on the headlights. Insects in the wing mirrors. Insects packed into the radiator grille so densely that mechanics had to fish them out. This was simply the weather of the British summer, the cost of moving through a country that was still, in living memory, full of flying things. Get in a car now. Drive the same route. Stop at the services. The windscreen is clean. The Bugs Matter survey, run by Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife since 2004, has been measuring exactly this. Volunteers clean their numberplate, drive a journey, count the splats on a grid. Between 2004 and 2021, the UK average fell by roughly 59 per cent. England alone: 65. Kent: over 70. The 2024 update found a further 63 per cent drop on top of that. The windscreen phenomenon has the data to back it up now. And not just the insects. Between 1970 and 2024, the UK Farmland Bird Index fell by 62 per cent. Turtle doves down 99. Grey partridge down 94. Tree sparrow down 90. A generation of British children has grown up without ever hearing a turtle dove call, because there are, in functional terms, no turtle doves left to call. Defra's own bulletin lists the causes without embarrassment. Loss of mixed farming. The switch from spring to autumn sowing, which took away the winter stubble the small birds had been feeding on since the Neolithic. The grubbing up of hedgerows to make fields bigger for bigger machines. Increased fertiliser. Increased pesticide. Specifically, the pesticides. Neonicotinoids on oilseed rape. Glyphosate sprayed as a pre-harvest desiccant on wheat and barley. Chemicals applied in combinations and volumes that would have seemed psychotic to a farmer in 1950, applied to grow the crops that feed directly into the plant-based shakes marketed to people who believe they are helping the environment. The insects died in the fields where the crops were grown. The birds that used to eat the insects, starved. The windscreen, accordingly, is clean. None of this happened on the permanent pasture that cattle graze. A herb-rich meadow grazed by cattle has more pollinators, more ground-nesting birds, more beetles, more everything per hectare than the arable field next door. The South Downs and the Welsh uplands and the Cotswold commons where sheep and cattle have been grazing for a thousand years are the places British biodiversity is still, just, holding on. The countryside did not empty because of the cow. It emptied because we replaced the cow with the combine harvester, the meadow with the oilseed rape, and the hedgerow with another half-acre of monoculture that needed spraying fourteen times a season to keep it alive. When someone tells you eating a steak is destroying British wildlife, ask them what was on the field before it became the soy farm, the rape farm, the wheat farm that produced the oat milk in their fridge. It was grass. And on the grass, there were cattle. And when the cattle were there, the windscreen needed cleaning.

A beautiful Peacock Butterfly at RSPB Greylake at the weekend. 😍 Great to see the butterflies about again, although a fraction of the number nowadays than I used to see as a kid... 😔🦋

Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, we present to you the Queen of English Bluebells